Daring, drama and despair as the Olympics get off to a rousing start
Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty states that no one can predict the exact behavior of even a single atomic particle. Heisenberg might have appreciated the 1980 Winter Olympics. The Lake Placid Games have developed into a sort of festival of life's unpredictability. No one knows whether they will be the last Olympics of the modern era; international politics will settle that. A similar uncertainty hung like fog over the frozen spectators; none of them knew whether they would ever find a bus to carry them away from a darkening mountain to warmth again. Lake Placid's logistics tended toward the existential.
A number of athletes were also discovering something about life's talent for surprise. Canada's Ken Read, a favorite to win the most important ski race in the world, the Olympic men's downhill, pitched himself out of the starting gate and 15 seconds into his run, felt the safety binding on his left ski let go. Read parted with the ski and the potential gold he had spent years training for. The men's downhill winner was just as unpredictable: Austria's Leonhard Stock, the 21-year-old Tyrol farmer's son who was not even supposed to be a starter on the downhill team. The women's downhill, however, followed form. The favorite was Austria's Anne-marie Moser-Pröll, 26, who had captured the World Cup six times but had never taken an Olympic event. She attacked Whiteface Mountain fiercely, won easily and was mobbed by jubilant members of her ski club from back home in Kleinarl, who trampled down fences to get to her.
The American pursuit of gold went haltingly at first. Although Pete Patterson finished an unexpected fifth in the downhill, Karl Anderson tumbled spectacularly just out of the gate, and Phil Mahre, considered the best U.S. skier, managed only a 14th. Bill Koch, 24, who surprised the world with a silver medal in the 30-km cross-country four years ago at Innsbruck, surprised it again. With 8 km to go, Koch found himself back in 23rd position and, rather than finish exhausted, dropped out and skied off through the forest. He hoped to save energy for the 15-km event, but he ended up 16th as, in an astonishing finish, Sweden's Thomas Wassberg edged Finland's Juha Mieto by one-hundredth of a second.
In the 1,500-meter race, Speed Skater Beth Heiden, 20, had reason for hope as she flashed across the finish line in 2:13.10. She had just broken the Olympic record by 3.48 sec. The trouble: 17 other skaters also were to break the record. Beth ended up in seventh place as Annie Borchink, 28, a sturdy Dutch nursing student, glided off with the gold in a time of 2:10.95. But no one was hit by Heisenberg's Principle harder than the American pairs figure-skating team of Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia. The Olympics' most touching moment was the sight of the brilliant Gardner sprawling on the ice, victim of a muscle pull that ended the golden hopes of Randy and Tai.